by Lance Abbott
People have been railing against and misrepresenting liberalism almost since its inception. And yet, despite centuries of criticism and countless illiberal attempts to undermine or redefine it, liberalism has produced more peace, more prosperity, and more egalitarianism than any social or political framework humanity has ever known. The historical record of the Western world over the last three centuries demonstrates this conclusively.
As liberalism spread beyond the West, to places like Japan, South Korea, and Chile, and even through partial or constrained implementations, such as China’s economic liberalization over the past five decades, its efficacy has repeatedly asserted itself. Wherever liberal principles take root, human flourishing follows.
Paradoxically, liberalism has become a victim of its own astronomical success. Human beings evolved to contend with scarcity, violence, and existential threat. Liberal societies, by largely taming those forces, have left us psychologically unprepared for the absence of genuine catastrophe. When life becomes safer, wealthier, and more stable—almost absurdly so by historical standards—we do not simply relax into gratitude. Instead, we search for meaning in grievance.
Liberalism’s great weakness, its Achilles’ heel, is that it runs directly counter to innate human cognitive biases. We are intuitive, anecdotal, and tribal by nature. We are not naturally tolerant, charitable, or pluralistic. Those traits must be consciously cultivated. Absent serious reflection on how we arrived at this extraordinary state of affairs, our more primitive instincts rebel. Petty disagreements are elevated into moral emergencies, and political identity is recast as existential struggle.
Without disciplined moral and intellectual introspection, the mind insists that the world cannot possibly be as good as it actually is. So we search for villains. Liberalism, offering compromise instead of outrage and pluralism instead of moral absolutism, fails to satisfy the part of us that craves indignation and tribal affirmation. And so we turn on it, because how could tolerance, restraint, and mutual accommodation possibly be virtues, whispers the self-righteous brainstem.
The uncomfortable truth is that we largely stumbled into liberalism. A small number of people, more interested in improving the human condition than in feeding their own insecurities, thought carefully about how deeply imperfect, historically antagonistic societies might nonetheless coexist. And, by historical accident, they found themselves in positions where those ideas could be implemented.
Do not mistake that for inevitability. Liberalism was not easy to establish. It was fiercely contested. It encountered resistance not only from entrenched power, but from human nature itself. Liberalism is not the natural order of mankind. It is anomalous. It is fragile. And it can be lost.
Both Wokeism and Trumpism represent direct assaults on the liberal order, but they are symptoms, not root causes. The deeper problem is that we allowed illiberalism to seep into our institutions. We tolerated the privatization of gains and the socialization of losses. We accepted reckless monetary manipulation that rewarded those already insulated from inflation while quietly eroding everyone else’s purchasing power. These are real failures, but they are not failures of liberalism. They are failures to adhere to it.
Make no mistake, liberalism is not the cause of our present dysfunction. Liberalism is the solution. Illiberal impulses brought us to this moment, and only a recommitment to liberal principles, rule of law, pluralism, restraint, tolerance, and individual rights, can restore balance.
And this matters not merely to preserve what we have, but to unlock what comes next. The future available to a liberal society—one that disciplines its worst instincts rather than indulging them—is greater than most people can even imagine. The material, scientific, and cultural progress still within reach dwarfs anything humanity has yet achieved. Our successes thus far are not a culmination; they are a prelude.
But that future is not guaranteed. It depends entirely on whether we can constrain our illiberal impulses—our hunger for certainty, our craving for enemies, our reflexive tribalism—before they dismantle the very system that made such progress possible.
Lance Abbott is a network engineer and occasional writer with a strong bias toward empiricism and classical liberalism. Skeptical of tribes, loyal to reason.
Leave a Reply